Pot-infused wine, beer creates buzz in Gourmet mag

I swear I wasn’t searching specifically for this, but a curiosity-raising link on Huffington Post this morning led me to Time’s NewsFeed blog, which led me to this article in Gourmet magazine about adding marijuana to food and drink.

The article notes that some wineries and American homebrewers are infusing their products with pot, as “liquid extracts allow nearly any drink to be infused with cannabis”:

Beer probably has the most natural affinity with marijuana; after all, hops and marijuana are botanically speaking, kissing cousins. Boutique brewers in Europe and home brewers in the U.S. have been known to use cannabis tincture and plant matter to create THC-infused beer. Within the bounds of American law, Nectar Ales in Paso Robles, California, makes Humboldt Brown Ale with denatured hemp seeds (containing no measurable THC). The toastier, nuttier quality of the seed is highlighted rather than the herbal, funky character one would get from the plant itself. It is an interesting, unexpected expression of hemp, enjoyable even without its famous effects.

So, of course, that led me the Nectar Ales website, where I learned that its Hemp Ale has won several medals, including a World Beer Cup bronze in 2006.

Now, since this blog post has been the result of a series of jumps from item to item, let’s jump back to last week’s piece on the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition. The filmmaker said, among other things in our interview, that he hopes the series at least “raises questions” about the nation’s ongoing prohibition against marijuana.

He said he sees some parallels with the failed Prohibition brought on by ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, but he said the comparison isn’t “one to one” because pot doesn’t date back as far as booze and it has always been more subcultural than mainstream.

One reader took the point a bit further in the comments, striking out at “those who find a successful and tolerant society so unpleasant that they support government coercion and the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens even though at great risk to their own personal safety and financial security.”

Wrote commenter malcolm kyle:

During alcohol prohibition, all profits went to enrich thugs and criminals. Young men died every day on inner-city streets while battling over turf. A fortune was wasted on enforcement that could have gone on education etc. On top of the budget-busting prosecution and incarceration costs, billions in taxes were lost. Finally the economy collapsed. Sound familiar?

That was similar to the sentiment I detected in the 215 online comments to yesterday’s article about a pot bust in Fort Bend County. Among those arrested were a woman and her 19-year-old daughter, but most of the harsh words were directed not at the woman’s child-rearing skills but at the enforcement efforts for a bust that netted less than 2 ounces of weed.

Now my curiosity is piqued again: Do you think it’s time to legalize marijuana? If it were legal, would you want to try it in beer?